Martin Brown
"That's not how I see it... I have wanted to do this for a long time. Kill kids, strangle them, beat people's heads in. Rip their eyes out. ... Just listen to the scream, see them die in agony. I finally get to do that now." Martin Brown, also known as The Pig Butcher '''(or simply '''The Butcher in the Level Editor), is a playable character in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. Martin Brown is a large fat man, similar to the Thugs, perhaps having gained weight for the imposing size needed for the role in Midnight Animal. He first appeared in the trailer for Hotline Miami ''("Wear Something Fancy"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMOdXb3GvwM.), which implied he was the protagonist. This may be why the actual player character, Jacket, is wearing a pig mask in the tutorial of the first game. Martin Brown is a famous actor. According to the host of an interview, he is known for presumably even tempered performances in the films ''Land of Trees, The Calm, and Blue Ocean. He's now playing The Pig Butcher, the serial killer of the Jacket-inspired slasher film Midnight Animal, for which he is accused of being a sell out. During a dream interview, Martin says that he uses the film as a vehicle to live out his personal fantasies of brutal murder, and that he revels in the permission to commit violence. His community assets can be found here. Events in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number In the game's intro we see Martin taking on the role of the Pig Butcher as Midnight Animal's credits pass over the screen. In the movie, the Pig Butcher enters a building and kills several weed-smoking, pizza-eating teenagers, only one of which has a lethal attack that harms the player. Once he clears out the first floor, he has the option to pick up a solid pink phone which tells him to "get the girl", a reference to the real David Lynch films Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Blue Velvet (respectively: surreal phone calls, surreal solid-pink objects, and breaking into a woman's apartment for a rape scene). The depiction of the phone as surreal reveals that society views Jacket's rampage as an act of lone insanity. Upstairs, he removes a double barrel shotgun and blows away an easy going man who resembles Beard. In the bedroom an attractive blonde couple are embracing, and upon entering the man uselessly punches Martin before backing away and being killed. At the end of the scene, he "wounds" the film version of Jacket's girlfriend and proceeds to "rape" her. The scene ends as the Director yells "Cut!" and sends all of the actors home, telling them to prepare for the next day of filming. During a dream in which he is being interviewed about the movie, he is visited by Richard (seated in the audience wearing Jacket's clothes) who observes "You really enjoy hurting other people, don't you?" Martin begins to justify that his actions aren't real, that it's just a film. Richard vaguely warns that the film has a twist ending Martin won't like. When the final day of filming starts, the actress escapes The Butcher's apartment (extremely similar to Jacket's) as he sleeps. A copy of the script on the table details a scene of him raping the girl in the precinct, possibly indicating he was given a faked script by Rouven to get a more genuine reaction, or has an early version of the script which he values highly. The Pig Butcher is found by the police and is taken to a police station. One of the policemen "interrogating" Martin's character tells him that he's "fucked... completely fucked... in the head" and that he should stop hallucinating, due to Martin's constant muttering about the ringing of a telephone. The interrogator mentions that Martin doesn't even know why he does the things he does. Once the policeman starts to leave, Martin then picks up the pink phone which tells him to kill everyone and, once again, get to the girl. After killing the police officers and cartoonishly ripping the head and spine out of a dual wielding, combat rolling action movie SWAT officer, he enters the interrogation room and is shot multiple times by Rachael with a gun, before she shouts that she isn't his "fucking girlfriend." The scene then ends and Rouven raves that there's no need for a second take and that filming is basically done now. Rachael congratulates Martin and tells him to get up, but he's actually dead, apparently having been shot with live ammo. Context A December 9th newspaper implies Midnight Animal has been released by this point."Galaxy Film once again received heavy critique over latest block buster... ...sparked a controversy over the film adaptation of Miami maniac murders." An interview with an unnamed actor who starred in the same movies listed in Martin Brown's dream interview can air on December 28th, which could be a posthumous rerun of a real Brown interview, or a different actor entirely if Brown was just a crazed murderer. The placement of the interview hinges on whether or not Evan gave up writing his book on the masked killers, and is apparently placed to reaffirm society's interest in media in the absence of a clear investigation into the events. Martin Brown's events are undated, and he is the only character that doesn't interact with any other player character in the main story, having no relation to 50 Blessings or the Russian mafia. He does share some links with detective Manny Pardo: both crave for attention, a ghostly film crew appearing during Pardo's investigation and more prominently in his nightmare, and both of them have a finale level featuring them slaughtering the staff of a police station. Bad attempts at romantic relationships with blonde women are also established with both Martin Brown and Pardo, and Pardo actually regularly hallucinates about Rouven Blankenfeld and the film crew, possibly re-contextualizing all of Brown's scenes as Pardo's fantasies. Pardo and Evan's top-down head sprites are also used on two "officers" in the film set buffet line in the outro to Final Cut before the transition to First Trial, where Evan immediately interrupts a vaguely busy and irritated Pardo over the phone. This is extremely similar to the early scene in Drive where the audience is given a brief fake-out that the Driver is a police officer due to his film set costume. The SWAT Chief appears in the outro to Death Wish. Pardo steals the Death Wish and Dead Ahead operations from both of these officers resulting in their berating him. These officers could actually be involved in the production of Midnight Animal as a realism gimmick. Pardo could be outdoing them in emulation of the movie or to wrest the media's attention from the movie. Assuming Martin wasn't killed in production, and is really doing the actions portrayed in his levels to reenact the film before getting shot with a police gun, could explain how there's a situation at the station in the outro to Caught. However, it's possible the incident at the station was rioting in response to the presidential assassination and uprising. In the end, it is up to player's interpretation to determine whether Martin Brown was a famous actor who died because of a faulty movie prop, a Jacket copycat guided by his hallucinations and killed in self-defense, just an actor that was method acting or just a pure dream entity of Manny Pardo. Playstyle The Pig Butcher plays nearly identically to Jacket, but the difference is that Martin Brown is slower, and swings melee weapons slower, which applies to every character in Hotline Miami 2. His aim and his punches are slightly slower than average, but compensates it with his quicker default execution, which is 0.75 seconds long in comparison to the average stomp time of 1 second. His punches also have less range to them. He pumps shotguns in the air rather than with his hand, and grabs downed, leaning-on-wall enemies and bashes their heads against the wall. In the Beta however, the Pig Butcher also had the ability to do a standing execution, where he would headbutt the enemy. Overall, Martin Brown is quite a straight-forward character to play as for his brief appearances in the game. List of victims This is a compiled list of how many murders Martin Brown has committed in Midnight Animal, kills in bold are kills determined by player’s choice. * Swat Chief * Interrogator * 33 Police Officers (including Inspectors - not counting the Interrogator or the SWAT Chief) * At least 5 teenagers Overall, Martin Brown has committed 40 murders in Midnight Animal. (41 if you count the SWAT Chief) Trivia *Martin Brown is the only one in the entire game who has not killed anybody, since logically speaking, all the “kills“ performed by Martin were just filmed and scripted. *His unused sprites that were apparent in the trailer "Wear Something Fancy" can be found in the files of Hotline Miami. *His insistence that the violence isn't real parallels how players might distance themselves from their own role and action in the games. "Actor" and "player" notably were synonymous terms at one point. *Martin's tutorial and the tutorial pig mask in the first game likely represent the new-coming player as being a "pig." *Martin's death by prop gun may possibly be a reference to the death of Brandon Lee, the son of the legendary Bruce Lee, as he too was killed by a prop gun loaded with a defective blank during filming of "The Crow". *Level-wise, the death of Martin is the very first death of a playable character shown in Hotline Miami 2. **Chronologically, the first death of a playable character would be Beard. *Martin Brown's death is heavily debated about, due to conflicting evidence and theories, although it is most likely he was method acting. One of the main forms of evidence involves is that the film is mentioned in a newspaper, that it was released around December 2nd, and that Martin Brown appears in a possibly live interview on the 28th of December. **Method Acting involves the actor "stepping into their shoes" to achieve better characterizations of the fictional character, this can possibly explain why Martin Brown has the script, doesn't get up after he is shot (if one doesn't believe the 9mm was loaded with live ammunition) **The table sequence shows Martin shot after he's done talking rather than as a skeleton like the other guests who were caught in the nuke's blast. This would suggest that Martin did actually die at the end of Final Cut. References Category:Hotline Miami 2 characters Category:Hotline Miami 2 playable characters Category:Playable characters Category:Characters Category:Unclear fate